End of an era at CJOH

Max Keeping’s voice is rough and Carol Anne Meehan is outright weeping as they announce he’s going to give his last newscast in March, after 37 years. Max will be a “community ambassador” for two years more, he says. The successor, as we reported earlier today, is Graham Richardson, till now of CTV’s parliamentary bureau, will start working for CJOH in January and take over from Max when he leaves the anchor desk. It’s not clear who will take over Max’s job as CTV Ottawa’s vice-president of news.

I don’t know Max personally — I’ve only been in a room with him a few times and never spoken to him directly — but it says something that I find myself automatically calling him “Max” as I write this. Max is warm and he’s safe. As Richardson said a few minutes ago upon being introduced as his successor, you always know what you’re going to get when you tune in at 6 o’clock to a Max Keeping newscast. That’s comforting.

I hope, however, that with a change in anchors comes some change in approach. Does a grown-up city have a “happiness file” of elderly people’s birthdays and anniversaries on the nightly news? Children’s drawings on the weather forecast? Tape of practically every single fundraiser conducted every day in the city, if a station personality is in attendance? And a constantly changing supporting cast of junior reporters covering a good chunk of the news in, honestly, not a whole lot of depth?

The formula apparently works, and that’s a point that’s hard to argue with. It’s the No. 1 newscast in Ottawa, so they must certainly be doing something right. They have some experienced people — I praised Norman Fetterley just the other day and he’s not the only one — who do good work. But by and large, the CTV Ottawa newscast is, like Max Keeping, nonthreatening above all, and that’s not what the Ottawa of 2010 needs.

Richardson’s more of a rough-and-tumble guy, with elbows sharpened in Toronto and on Parliament Hill, and maybe he can bring a bigger-city style to the newscast, with the help of whoever takes over as CTV Ottawa’s news boss if it’s not him. Not, I hope, with a bunch of stylistic changes like needless live standups and ever-more car crashes and “Is your family in danger?” stuff, but with smarter and tougher coverage of stories that matter.

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